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Abstract
At the turn of the twentieth century, the sound of presidential address changed from an orotund style to an instructional style. The orotund style had featured the careful pronunciation of consonants, elongated vowels, trilled r's and repeated declamations. The instructional style, on the other hand, mimicked the conversational lectures of the professor. The shift from orotund to instructional was activated by the arrival of millions of foreign language–speaking immigrants, the increasing power of the working class, and concerns over the effects of sedentary employment on the men who had formerly dominated politics. These pressures culminated in a questioning of the manliness of the orotund style. Theodore Roosevelt, whose manliness had been questioned in the 1880s, responded by writing volumes about manliness and adopting the instructional style in his presidential oratory at the turn of the twentieth century.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Charles E. Morris III, J. David Cisneros, Jeremy Engels, Cara Buckley, John Louis Lucaites, and the anonymous reviewers for their critical engagement with this essay and with sonic rhetoric
Notes
1. Henry Adams Bellows, “Broadcasting and Speech Habits,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 17 (1931): 245–52.
2. Hadley Cantril and Gordon W. Allport, The Psychology of Radio (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935), 7, 72, 127–37, 260; and Henry Lee Ewbank, “Studies in the Techniques of Radio Speech,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 18 (1932): 560–71.
3. Quarterly Journal of Speech 19 (1933).
4. See Joshua Gunn, “Speech Is Dead; Long Live Speech,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94 (2008): 343–64; John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 211–17; Eric King Watts, “‘Voice’ and ‘Voicelessness’ in Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001): 179–96; James P. McDaniel, “Figures for New Frontiers, from Davy Crockett to Cyberspace Gurus,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 91–111; and Samuel McCormick, “Earning One's Inheritance: Rhetorical Criticism, Everyday Talk, and the Analysis of Public Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 109–31. The list of published scholarship about sound generated by fields outside of rhetoric over the past decade is extensive. Highlights include Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1939 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
5. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977; Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994), 55–56; Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 96; and Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 267.
6. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934; New York: Harbinger Book, 1963), 203.
7. Theodore W. Adorno, The Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (1949; New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 198.
8. Didier Anzieu, “L'Enveloppe sonore du soi,” Nouvelle Revue de Pyschanalyse 38 (1976): 161–79; and Edith Lecourt, “The Musical Envelope,” in Psychic Envelopes, ed. Didier Anzieu, trans. Daphne Briggs (London: Karnac Books, 1990), 211–35.
9. Greg Goodale, Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).
10. Kevin Michael DeLuca, Christine Harold, and Kenneth Rufo, “Q.U.I.L.T.: A Patchwork of Reflections,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 10 (2007): 640.
11. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 7–12.
12. Cara A. Finnegan, “Recognizing Lincoln: Image Vernaculars in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8 (2005), 49–50.
13. Gail Jefferson, “Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction,” in Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, ed. Gene H. Lerner (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2004), 13–31; McCormick, “Earning One's Inheritance,” 128n29. Dr. Heidi Kevoe Feldman assisted with the transcriptions.
14. McCormick, “Earning One's Inheritance,” 109.
15. See Halford Ross Ryan, “Roosevelt's First Inaugural: A Study of Technique,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 65 (1979): 138; Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 83, 87; and Davis W. Houck and Mihaela Nocasian, “FDR's First Inaugural Address: Text, Context, and Reception,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5 (2002): 661.
16. Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine, The People and the President: America's Conversation with FDR (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 16–17.
17. John Erskine, “The Future of Radio as a Cultural Medium,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 177 (1935): 214.
18. Orrin E. Dunlap Jr., “When 13 Is Lucky,” New York Times, July 23, 1939.
19. Schafer, Soundscape, 274–75.
20. Vanessa B. Beasley, You, the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 9.
21. Mary Stuckey, Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 2.
22. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 76.
23. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Islowsky (1965; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 468–71.
24. Lawrence W. Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 162–63.
25. Dale F. Coye, Pronouncing Shakespeare's Words: A Guide from A to Zounds (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 10.
26. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783; Philadelphia: T. Elwood Zell, 1866), 202.
27. Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, 53.
28. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 17–24; and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “The US Presidential Campaigns of 1908 and 1912: The Reshaping of American Political Campaigns,” CD liner notes accompanying In Their Own Voices: The US Presidential Elections of 1908 and 1912 (Philadelphia: Annenberg School for Communication/Marston Records, 2000), 6–9.
29. McCormick, “Earning One's Inheritance,” 125.
30. Levine, Unpredictable Past, 163. See also Lewis L. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 29–30.
31. Finnegan, “Recognizing Lincoln,” 49–50.
32. Roy Rozenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers & Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States: The T.U.E.L. to the End of the Gompers Era (New York: International, 1991).
33. Jamieson, Packaging the Presidency, 17–24.
34. Richard Bauman and Patrick Feaster, “Oratorical Footing in a New Medium: Recordings of Presidential Campaign Speeches, 1896–1912,” Texas Linguistic Forum 47 (2003), http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/salsa/proceedings/2003/bauman&feaster.pdf, 6, 9–10.
35. Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo: Evolution of the Phonograph (1959; Indianapolis, IN: Howard W. Sams, 1976), 165, 216–17.
36. Ward Marston, “The Gramophone and the Campaigns of 1908 and 1912,” CD liner notes accompanying In Their Own Voices: The US Presidential Elections of 1908 and 1912(Philadelphia: Annenberg School for Communication/Marston Records, 2000), 37–41; William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph in Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 24–25; and Read and Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo, 105–6.
37. Pierre Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 45, 53–54, 97. Bourdieu recognizes that his methodology goes beyond conversation analysis. Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 143. Though much work has been done at the intersection of sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, and rhetoric, additional relationships—in particular to sound—have yet to be developed. See John Fiske, “Writing Ethnographies: Contribution to a Dialogue,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 332–33; Thomas S. Frentz and Thomas B. Farrell, “Language-Action: A Paradigm for Communication,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 62 (1976): 333–49; and Richard Harvey Brown, Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 8–11.
38. Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power, 54.
39. Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power, 68.
40. This is a sonic manifestation of identification. See Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 19–23.
41. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (1979; Cambridge, MA: University of Harvard Press, 1984), 255.
42. Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power, 86–87, 96. See also Deborah Cameron, “Performing Gender Identity: Young Men's Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity,” in Language and Masculinity, ed. Sally Johnson and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 53.
43. George Washington Plunkitt, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, ed. William L. Riordan (1905; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 69.
44. Published references to non-heterosexual activities were rare before the 1930s. See Charles E. Morris III, “Contextual Twilight/Critical Liminality: J. M. Barrie's Courage at St. Andrews, 1922,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 208; and Charles E. Morris III, “Pink Herring & the Fourth Persona: J. Edgar Hoover's Sex Crime Panic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 228.
45. Plunkitt, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, 69–70.
46. Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (New York: Times Books, 1999), 14.
47. See Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 120–27; E. Anthony Rotondo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 247–51; and Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in America, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 17–18.
48. Quoted in Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 175.
49. Allen Warren, “Popular Manliness: Baden-Powell Scouting and the Development of Manly Character,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 201; and Alice Guy (dir.), Algie the Miner (Hollywood, CA: Solax Films, 1912).
50. John Poole Sandlands, The Voice and Public Speaking (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1879), 104.
51. Dion Boucicault, The Art of Acting (New York: Columbia University Press, 1926), 24.
52. See Richard Bauman and Patrick Feaster, “‘Fellow Townsmen and My Noble Constituents!’ Representations of Oratory on Early Commercial Recordings,” Oral Tradition 20 (2005): 40.
53. Jefferson, “Glossary of Transcript Symbols,” in Conversation Analysis, 13–31.
54. See Edward Napoleon Kirby, Public Speaking and Reading (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1896), 104.
55. Grover Cleveland, Grover Cleveland Gives His Front Porch Speech, CD WAV MP3, from Michigan State University's Vincent Voice Library, An Inventory of Spoken Word Audio Recordings, http://vvl.lib.msu.edu/showfindingaid.cfm?findaidid=ClevelandG.
56. William McKinley, William McKinley Gives a Campaign Speech from His Front Porch and Talks about the Civil War, 5 min., open-reel MP3, from Michigan State University's Vincent Voice Library, An Inventory of Spoken Word Audio Recordings, http://grp.lib.msu.edu/vvl.lib.msu.edu/showfindingaid.cfm?findaidid=McKinleyW.
57. See Bauman and Feaster, “Oratorical Footing in a New Medium,” n.p.
58. Richard Bebb, “The Voice of Henry Irving: An Investigation,” Recorded Sound 68 (1977): 730.
59. Gordon Craig, Henry Irving (Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1930), 65.
60. David Crystal, Think on My Words: Exploring Shakespeare's Language (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 125–30.
61. Douglas, Listening In, 108; Jules Zanger, “The Minstrel Show as Theatre of Misrule,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (1974): 35–36.
62. Rita Reif, “First Half of ‘Huck Finn,’ in Twain's Hand, Is Found,” New York Times, February 14, 1991.
63. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884; New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 156.
64. Brainard Gardner Smith, Reading and Speaking (New York: D.C. Heath, 1898), 25.
65. Solomon Henry Clark and Frederic Mason Blanchard, Practical Public Speaking: A Textbook for Colleges and Secondary Schools (New York: Scribner, 1899), 138, 127.
66. Edwin Du Bois Shurter, Public Speaking: A Treatise on Delivery with Selections for Declaiming (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1903), 26–27.
67. Shurter, Public Speaking, 30.
68. See Nicole Tonkovich, “Rhetorical Power in the Victorian Parlor: Godey's Ladies Book and the Gendering of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric,” in Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric, ed. Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 180; Nan Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910 (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 2002), 14, 21, 99.
69. G. Stanley Hall, “The Awkward Age,” Appleton's Magazine, August 1900, 154; and Kimmel, Manhood in America, 163, 166.
70. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 121.
71. Edward Amherst Ott, “Enemies Inside the Elocution Profession,” Werner's Magazine, November 1901, 203.
72. Ott, “Enemies Inside the Elocution Profession,” 204. See also Mary Loeffelholz, From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 125; and Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, 76–77.
73. Benjamin Harrison, “Address to the Pan-American Congress,” 1.4 min., open-reel MP3, An Inventory of Spoken Word Audio Recordings in the Vincent Voice Library, Michigan State University, http://vvl.lib.msu.edu/showfindingaid.cfm?findaidid=HarrisonB.
74. Garrett A. Hobart, Recorded for the Opening of the Electrical Exposition of New York City, MP3, from Edison National Historic Site, National Park Service: Documentary Recordings and Political Speeches, http://www.nps.gov/archive/edis/edisonia/documentary.htm.
75. Theodore Roosevelt, The Right of the People to Rule, MP3, from Edison National Historic Site, National Park Service: Documentary Recordings and Political Speeches, http://www.nps.gov/archive/edis/edisonia/documentary.htm.
76. Theodore Roosevelt, “Right of the People to Rule.”
77. Gardner Smith, Reading and Speaking, 19.
78. Theodore Roosevelt, “Right of the People to Rule.”
79. See Stuckey, Defining Americans, 179.
80. Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888; New York: Century, 1911), 119.
81. Theodore Emanuel Schmauk, The Voice, in Speech and Song (New York: John B. Alden, 1890), 33–34.
82. Ernest Pertwee, The Art of Speaking (New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1902), 29.
83. David Ffrangcon-Davies, The Singing of the Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1905), 22.
84. Theodore Roosevelt, “Right of the People to Rule.”
85. McKee Barclay, “Pianissimo Teddy!” in T.R in Cartoon, ed. Raymond Gros (New York: Saalfield Publishing, 1910), 28 (originally published in the Baltimore Sun).
86. Clifford Berryman, “Progressive Fallacies,” in Teaching with Documents: Political Cartoons Illustrating Progressivism and the Election of 1912, The National Archives, http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/election-cartoons/images/progressive-fallacies.gif (originally published in the Evening Star of Washington, DC).
87. Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 51; and Craig H. Roell, The Piano in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 23–24.
88. See Stephen B. Katz, The Epistemic Music of Rhetoric: Toward the Temporal Dimension of Affect in Reader Response and Writing (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1996), 104–13; George J. Buelow, “Rhetoric and Music,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Sir George Grove and Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1981) 15:793–95; and Patrick McCreless, “Music and Rhetoric,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 847–78.
89. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 170.
90. Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 250.
91. Kirby, Public Speaking and Reading, 100–1.
92. Jeffrey K. Tullis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 4; and Ryan L. Teten, “The Evolution of the Modern Rhetorical Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 33 (2003): 339.
93. Elvin T. Lim, “Five Trends in Presidential Rhetoric: An Analysis of Rhetoric from George Washington to Bill Clinton,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 32 (2002): 338–45.
94. Robert J. Higgs, “Yale and the Heroic Ideal: Gotterdammerüng and Palingenesis, 1865–1914,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 160; and Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence, 237–38.
95. Len Spencer, “Gettysburg Address” (1903), from Antique Audio Show Internet Archive, Open Source Audio, http://www.archive.org/details/AntiqueAudioShowForJanuary282008; and see Baumann and Feaster, “Fellow Townsmen and My Noble Constituents,” 39.
96. See Earl W. Wiley, “Lincoln the Speaker,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 21 (1935): 306; Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 37; and Charles E. Morris III, “Hard Evidence: The Vexations of Lincoln's Queer Corpus,” in Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics, ed. Barbara Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 185–214.
97. William Pittenger, Extempore Speech: How to Acquire and Practice It (Philadelphia: Penn Publishing, 1899), 119.
98. Frederick Houk Law, Mastery of Speech (New York: Independent, 1919), 1:9–21.
99. D. W. Griffiths (dir.), Abraham Lincoln (Hollywood, CA: United Artists, 1930).
100. Arthur Elliot Sproul, “Roosevelt and Lincoln: Similarity in Clarity of Speech Leads to Comment,” New York Times, June 20, 1933.